Distinctive as their case may be, the story of the Wright brothers tells us something important about employment in the U.S. today. Most work in the U.S. is new work, as U.S. census forms reveal. That is, a majority of jobs are in occupations that have only emerged widely since 1940, according to a major new study of U.S. jobs led by MIT economist David Autor.
"We estimate that about six out of 10 jobs people are doing at present didn't exist in 1940," says Autor, co-author of a newly published paper detailing the results. "A lot of the things that we do today, no one was doing at that point. Most contemporary jobs require expertise that didn't exist back then, and was not relevant at that time."
This finding, covering the period 1940 to 2018, yields some larger implications. For one thing, many new jobs are created by technology. But not all: Some come from consumer demand, such as health care services jobs for an aging population.
On another front, the research shows a notable divide in recent new-job creation: During the first 40 years of the 1940-2018 period, many new jobs were middle-class manufacturing and clerical jobs, but in the last 40 years, new job creation often involves either highly paid professional work or lower-wage service work.
Finally, the study brings novel data to a tricky question: To what extent does technology create new jobs, and to what extent does it replace jobs?
The paper, "New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940-2018," appears in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The co-authors are Autor, the Ford Professor of Economics at MIT; Caroline Chin, a PhD student in economics at MIT; Anna Salomons, a professor in the School of Economics at Utrecht University; and Bryan Seegmiller SM '20, PhD '22, an assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Northwestern University.
"This is the hardest, most in-depth project I've ever done in my research career," Autor adds. "I feel we've made progress on things we didn't know we could make progress on."
"Technician, fingernail"
To conduct the study, the scholars dug deeply into government data about jobs and patents, using natural language processing techniques that identified related descriptions in patent and census data to link innovations and subsequent job creation. The U.S. Census Bureau tracks the emerging job descriptions that respondents provide - like the ones the Wright brothers wrote down. Each decade's jobs index lists about 35,000 occupations and 15,000 specialized variants of them.
Many new occupations are straightforwardly the result of new technologies creating new forms of work. For instance, "Engineers of computer applications" was first codified in 1970, "Circuit layout designers" in 1990, and "Solar photovoltaic electrician" made its debut in 2018.
"Many, many forms of expertise are really specific to a technology or a service," Autor says. "This is quantitatively a big deal."
He adds: "When we rebuild the electrical grid, we're going to create new occupations - not just electricians, but the solar equivalent, i.e., solar electricians. Eventually that becomes a specialty. The first objective of our study is to measure [this kind of process]; the second is to show what it responds to and how it occurs; and the third is to show what effect automation has on employment."
On the second point, however, innovations are not the only way new jobs emerge. The wants and needs of consumers also generate new vocations. As the paper notes, "Tattooers" became a U.S. census job category in 1950, "Hypnotherapists" was codified in 1980, and "Conference planners" in 1990. Also, the date of U.S. Census Bureau codification is not the first time anyone worked in those roles; it is the point at which enough people had those jobs that the bureau recognized the work as a substantial employment category. For instance, "Technician, fingernail" became a category in 2000.
"It's not just technology that creates new work, it's new demand," Autor says. An aging population of baby boomers may be creating new roles for personal health care aides that are only now emerging as plausible job categories.
All told, among "professionals," essentially specialized white-collar workers, about 74 percent of jobs in the area have been created since 1940. In the category of "health services" - the personal service side of health care, including general health aides, occupational therapy aides, and more - about 85 percent of jobs have emerged in the same time. By contrast, in the realm of manufacturing, that figure is just 46 percent.
Differences by degree
The fact that some areas of employment feature relatively more new jobs than others is one of the major features of the U.S. jobs landscape over the last 80 years. And one of the most striking things about that time period, in terms of jobs, is that it consists of two fairly distinct 40-year periods.
In the first 40 years, from 1940 to about 1980, the U.S. became a singular postwar manufacturing powerhouse, production jobs grew, and middle-income clerical and other office jobs grew up around those industries.
But in the last four decades, manufacturing started receding in the U.S., and automation started eliminating clerical work. From 1980 to the present, there have been two major tracks for new jobs: high-end and specialized professional work, and lower-paying service-sector jobs, of many types. As the authors write in the paper, the U.S. has seen an "overall polarization of occupational structure."
That corresponds with levels of education. The study finds that employees with at least some college experience are about 25 percent more likely to be working in new occupations than those who possess less than a high school diploma.
"The real concern is for whom the new work has been created," Autor says. "In the first period, from 1940 to 1980, there's a lot of work being created for people without college degrees, a lot of clerical work and production work, middle-skill work. In the latter period, it's bifurcated, with new work for college graduates being more and more in the professions, and new work for noncollege graduates being more and more in services."
Still, Autor adds, "This could change a lot. We're in a period of potentially consequential technology transition."
At the moment, it remains unclear how, and to what extent, evolving technologies such as artificial intelligence will affect the workplace. However, this is also a major issue addressed in the current research study: How much does new technology augment employment, by creating new work and viable jobs, and how much does new technology replace existing jobs, through automation? In their paper, Autor and his colleagues have produced new findings on that topic, which are outlined in part 2 of this MIT News series.
Does technology help or hurt employment?
Ever since the Luddites were destroying machine looms, it has been obvious that new technologies can wipe out jobs. But technical innovations also create new jobs: Consider a computer programmer, or someone installing solar panels on a roof.
Overall, does technology replace more jobs than it creates? What is the net balance between these two things? Until now, that has not been measured. But a new research project led by MIT economist David Autor has developed an answer, at least for U.S. history since 1940.
The study uses new methods to examine how many jobs have been lost to machine automation, and how many have been generated through "augmentation," in which technology creates new tasks. On net, the study finds, and particularly since 1980, technology has replaced more U.S. jobs than it has generated.
"There does appear to be a faster rate of automation, and a slower rate of augmentation, in the last four decades, from 1980 to the present, than in the four decades prior," says Autor, co-author of a newly published paper detailing the results.
However, that finding is only one of the study's advances. The researchers have also developed an entirely new method for studying the issue, based on an analysis of tens of thousands of U.S. census job categories in relation to a comprehensive look at the text of U.S. patents over the last century. That has allowed them, for the first time, to quantify the effects of technology over both job loss and job creation.
Previously, scholars had largely just been able to quantify job losses produced by new technologies, not job gains.
"I feel like a paleontologist who was looking for dinosaur bones that we thought must have existed, but had not been able to find until now," Autor says. "I think this research breaks ground on things that we suspected were true, but we did not have direct proof of them before this study."
The paper, "New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940-2018," appears in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The co-authors are Autor, the Ford Professor of Economics; Caroline Chin, a PhD student in economics at MIT; Anna Salomons, a professor in the School of Economics at Utrecht University; and Bryan Seegmiller SM '20, PhD '22, an assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Northwestern University.
Automation versus augmentation
The study finds that overall, about 60 percent of jobs in the U.S. represent new types of work, which have been created since 1940. A century ago, that computer programmer may have been working on a farm.
To determine this, Autor and his colleagues combed through about 35,000 job categories listed in the U.S. Census Bureau reports, tracking how they emerge over time. They also used natural language processing tools to analyze the text of every U.S. patent filed since 1920. The research examined how words were "embedded" in the census and patent documents to unearth related passages of text. That allowed them to determine links between new technologies and their effects on employment.
"You can think of automation as a machine that takes a job's inputs and does it for the worker," Autor explains. "We think of augmentation as a technology that increases the variety of things that people can do, the quality of things people can do, or their productivity."
From about 1940 through 1980, for instance, jobs like elevator operator and typesetter tended to get automated. But at the same time, more workers filled roles such as shipping and receiving clerks, buyers and department heads, and civil and aeronautical engineers, where technology created a need for more employees.
From 1980 through 2018, the ranks of cabinetmakers and machinists, among others, have been thinned by automation, while, for instance, industrial engineers, and operations and systems researchers and analysts, have enjoyed growth.
Ultimately, the research suggests that the negative effects of automation on employment were more than twice as great in the 1980-2018 period as in the 1940-1980 period. There was a more modest, and positive, change in the effect of augmentation on employment in 1980-2018, as compared to 1940-1980.
"There's no law these things have to be one-for-one balanced, although there's been no period where we haven't also created new work," Autor observes.
What will AI do?
The research also uncovers many nuances in this process, though, since automation and augmentation often occur within the same industries. It is not just that technology decimates the ranks of farmers while creating air traffic controllers. Within the same large manufacturing firm, for example, there may be fewer machinists but more systems analysts.
Relatedly, over the last 40 years, technological trends have exacerbated a gap in wages in the U.S., with highly educated professionals being more likely to work in new fields, which themselves are split between high-paying and lower-income jobs.
"The new work is bifurcated," Autor says. "As old work has been erased in the middle, new work has grown on either side."
As the research also shows, technology is not the only thing driving new work. Demographic shifts also lie behind growth in numerous sectors of the service industries. Intriguingly, the new research also suggests that large-scale consumer demand also drives technological innovation. Inventions are not just supplied by bright people thinking outside the box, but in response to clear societal needs.
The 80 years of data also suggest that future pathways for innovation, and the employment implications, are hard to forecast. Consider the possible uses of AI in workplaces.
"AI is really different," Autor says. "It may substitute some high-skill expertise but may complement decision-making tasks. I think we're in an era where we have this new tool and we don't know what's good for. New technologies have strengths and weaknesses and it takes a while to figure them out. GPS was invented for military purposes, and it took decades for it to be in smartphones."
He adds: "We're hoping our research approach gives us the ability to say more about that going forward."
As Autor recognizes, there is room for the research team's methods to be further refined. For now, he believes the research open up new ground for study.
"The missing link was documenting and quantifying how much technology augments people's jobs," Autor says. "All the prior measures just showed automation and its effects on displacing workers. We were amazed we could identify, classify, and quantify augmentation. So that itself, to me, is pretty foundational."
Support for the research was provided, in part, by The Carnegie Corporation; Google; Instituut Gak; the MIT Work of the Future Task Force; Schmidt Futures; the Smith Richardson Foundation; and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.
Research Report:"New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940-2018"
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